World

Chinese Hackers Attacked 'The New York Times' for Months

Chinese hackers continuously attacked The New York Times over the past four months, the paper revealed Thursday. The infiltrators grabbed reporters' passwords and accessed private emails before the Times expelled them.

The attacks began Oct. 25, the same day the paper published a story revealing Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao had garnered a multi-billion dollar profit through business deals.

The paper worked with AT&T and security firm Mandiant to track the hackers' activity. Security experts learned the hackers' patterns and identified backdoors they opened to allow themselves access to the Times' network. When enough intelligence about the hackers had been gathered, the Times closed off the hackers' access and revealed the attacks publicly.

The hackers accessed the Times by first infiltrating computers at American universities then directing their attacks through those computers to protect their identities. They installed 45 pieces of malware on the Times' network, which gave them access to all computers on that network.

The malware, according to the Times, eventually pointed to China as the source of the attack.

"The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China," reported the Times. "More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past."

The hackers stole the corporate passwords of every Times employee and were able to access the personal computers of 53 Times employees, though most of them were not newsroom workers. They were not able to access any delicate information regarding the Jiabao investigation, according to the Times' Executive Editor Jill Abramson.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied," Abramson told the Times' reporter who wrote of the attacks.

The Times uses Symantec anti-virus software, which detected only one piece of malware — a success rate of approximately 2% in this instance. Symantec said in a comment that "advanced attacks like the ones the New York Times described in the [] article underscore how important it is for companies, countries and consumers to make sure they are using the full capability of security solutions."

Cyberattacks between governments and non-state actors including media outlets have become commonplace in recent years. China, the United States, Israel, Russia and other governments have all been accused of launching attacks via computer worms or viruses.

China has been a particular hotbed of hacking activity, having been blamed for attacks against a wide range of targets including Google, the United Nations, Lockheed Martin, NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense and Bloomberg News. China's military, however, flatly denied any involvement in the attacks against the Times.

“Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security," China’s Ministry of National Defense told the Times. "To accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless."

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